Seperated from the continent for 160 million years, Madagascar, fourth island of the world by its surface, stretches from North to South along the Mozambique Channel, which hugs its west coast, and the immense Indian Ocean, which borders its east side. When the visitor enters the “Great Island” , as the Malagasy name it, deep into the lush primal forests or onto desertic plateaus where the strangest flora grows, he may forget the sea-side front _ five thousand kilometers of a coast with many facets. However, this island-continent owes everything to the sea because the history of Madagascar begins in a giant pirogue, the one which carried home the Malagasy of today from Indonesia and Africa more than 2000 years ago.

The Malagasy, as in Africa, are always smiling, but without exhuberance. Like Asians, there is mystery in their eyes. But a Malagasy is above all a Malagasy, neither totally asian nor completly african.This is why the visitor has the feeling he is penetrating a unique time-space, with authentic cultures and ancestral beliefs.

Strange and at the same time captivating, the inland offers to the visitor shades of wonderful landscapes, very different from one place to another but always colorful.

Here, in the East, the large humid forest, qualified as virgin, is a vestige of a variety of primitive vegetation and flora of the island- brazilian rose-wood, rose-wood, mahogany, ebony. In the undergrowth, a thousand of species of orchids and plants with endemic flowers, unique in the world , have been collected.

There, in the desertic Southwest, plants have had to adapt to the drought and are somewhat extravagant, like the giant baobabs.

The fauna too has many archaisms.